Auto create tables

[lorensr]

Would be nice to automatically create tables that are declared but not present in db?

It will trip people up, even if explained in readme

[Slava]

The rethinkdb driver doesn't autocreate tables. Why would Meteor do this?

[lorensr]

1. To match the behavior of making Meteor Mongo.Collections
2. Making things easier for developer

[Slava]

Yeah, I don't know if this is what RethinkDB developers would expect. We can certainly do this, but it is kinda weird given that Rethink has an explicit command for creating tables.

[lorensr]

They might not expect it, but if they're declaring the table and it doesn't
exist, they want it to exist, and so we're doing them a favor. IMO a net
good

On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 5:33 PM, Slava Kim notifications@github.com wrote:

Yeah, I don't know if this is what RethinkDB developers would expect. We
can certainly do this, but it is kinda weird given that Rethink has an
explicit command for creating tables.

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#4 (comment)
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[Slava]

Or you misspelled the name of the table and now you have two tables. In mongo at least the collection is not created if nothing was written to it.

[just-be-dev]

Please add these to neumino/reglite#3.

[smeijer]

I might hope that developers will detect "misspelled table names" while they're still actively writing their code. It is unlikely that unwanted tables will be created in a production environment.

If the final word about this is indeed to not auto-create tables, I would suggest adding an option or method to make the code create the table, and not require a db-admin to dive into the database administration interface.

Something like

new Rethink.Table('players', { autocreate: true });

Or, inspired by the mongo _ensureIndex method:

Players = new Rethink.Table('players');
Players.ensureTableExists(true);

[ciwolsey]

Agree with above post. It's no fun when you have a ton of tables and every time you deploy your app you have to create them all manually.

[Slava]

I think an autocreate flag might not be a bad idea. I just don't want to introduce any default behavior that is not expected from a raw RethinkDB driver. Especially, if it is modeled after MongoDB.

[rclai]

I don't know if this should be in a separate issue, but should we also account for custom primary key field names? In RethinkDB when you create a table, there's an option to set the name of the auto-generated primary key, which if not set, defaults to id. This is different from MongoDB, which makes _id the only primary key.